A fresh start overshadowed. A new building for the MPI for Brain Research

A fresh start overshadowed. A new building for the MPI for Brain Research

1961

Photo: The building of the MPI Brain Research around 1960, Archives of the Max Planck Society.

Photo: The building of the MPI Brain Research around 1960, Archives of the Max Planck Society.

The Max Planck Institute for Brain Research moved into a new building in Frankfurt in 1961, marking the end of its period of temporary accommodation in the post-war years. The Institute had been founded as the KWI for Brain Research in Berlin-Buch, from where it had been relocated in the last years of the war, its five Departments finding emergency accommodation in five different West German cities. They were now being reunited.
Among those who moved into the new facilities, however, were the former Department Heads Julius Hallervorden and Hugo Spatz, who had made their careers at the Institute during the Third Reich, and who had benefited from the inhuman system. They brought to the Institute a large collection of brain slices, which would later turn out to stem from victims of Nazi euthanasia, which Spatz and Hallervorden were themselves involved in.